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V. Madurga-Favieres

Publications and source records attributed to V. Madurga-Favieres.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

AGN X-ray Reflection Spectroscopy with ML MYTORUS:Neural Posterior Estimation with Training on Observation-Driven Parameter Grids

X-ray spectroscopy of active galactic nuclei (AGN) reveals key information about circumnuclear geometry. Many AGN show a narrow Fe K-alpha line at 6.4 keV and associated Compton-scattered continua, produced by primary continuum scattering in cold, neutral material far from the central supermassive black hole. We present a novel approach based on Simulation-Based Inference with Neural Posterior Estimation (SBI-NPE) to train a machine-learning (ML) model using NuSTAR spectral fitting results from the literature, adopting the physically motivated MYTORUS-decoupled model, which separates line-of-sight and global equivalent hydrogen column densities (NH_Z and NH_S). To overcome limitations of traditional frequentist fitting such as local minima, limited automation, reproducibility, and computational cost, we employ normalizing flows and autoregressive networks to learn flexible posterior distributions from simulated spectra. From 34 NuSTAR spectral fits, we generate 34,000 synthetic spectra using uniform and Gaussian parameter distributions, showing that the latter is more strongly observationally driven. The network is trained to infer four MYTORUS parameters: NH_Z, NH_S, the photon index Gamma, and the relative normalization AS. Mutual information analysis identifies optimal spectral regions and motivates the inclusion of redshift, exposure time, and Galactic absorption. The observation-based grid significantly outperforms uniform sampling, achieving predictive accuracies above 90 percent for NH_S and AS, 89 percent for NH_Z, and 82 percent for Gamma within one sigma, with a joint accuracy of 70 percent for all parameters. We publicly release ML MYTORUS with a web interface enabling fast, reproducible inference from NuSTAR spectra. An application to NGC 4388 illustrates the promise of this approach.

astro-ph.GA↗

Pulse profile variations in the accreting X-ray pulsar Vela X-1

Vela X-1 is a well-studied accreting X-ray pulsar, with a distinctive pulse profile that has been found to be very similar in different observations spread out over decades. On the other hand, significant variations down to the timescale of individual pulses have been observed. The physical mechanisms leading to the energy-resolved pulse profile and its variations are not fully understood. Long, uninterrupted observations of Vela X-1 with XMM-Newton in 2000, 2006 and 2019 at different orbital phases allow us to study variations of the pulse properties in the soft X-ray range on all timescales in detail. We aim to characterize and quantify the variations of pulse profiles and individual pulse cycles on all timescales probed, and to identify possible factors driving the observed variations on these timescales. We generated consistent energy-resolved pulse profiles for each observation, as well as profiles built from subsets of individual pulse cycles selected by time, flux, or similarity to the mean profiles. We identified five pulsed phases based on the profile morphology and hardness, and examined the relative contributions over time. To quantify short-timescale variability, we compared individual pulse cycles with synthetic light curves derived from scaled versions of the average profiles. The pulse profile of Vela X-1, when averaged over many pulse cycles, remains remarkably stable, as expected. The most prominent variations between epochs are attributable to changes in absorption. Residual systematic differences are primarily flux-dependent, with profiles showing less variability at higher flux levels. On shorter timescales, most individual pulse cycles resemble the average profile, even though significant, sporadic deviations are also present.

astro-ph.HE↗